Word: borley
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Dates: during 1956-1956
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Sixteen Hours. All or most of this was well known to the villagers of Borley when the Smiths took over their parish. In local pubs the rectory was known as "the most haunted house in England." Within a year, thanks to Rector Smith himself and an enthusiastic ghost hunter named Harry Price, its infamy had spread throughout the nation. Harry Price, an affable hobbyist of independent means, was far and away Britain's best-known investigator of psychic phenomena. His books on the subject were legion and readable, and his spectacular exposures of fake spiritualists were invariably good...
Called in by a London newspaper to investigate Parson Smith's complaints, Harry sped to Borley Rectory on June 12, 1929. Soon the old place began acting up as it never had before. Keys shot out of their keyholes like projectiles. Bells rang with no one to ring them. Pebbles and candlesticks hurtled through the air. Rappings and tappings sounded from all sides like a telegraphers' convention. Even the ghostly nun Marie put in a polite appearance in honor of the visitor. Altogether, wrote Price later, "it was a day to be remembered even by an experienced investigator...
From that time on, Borley Rectory's position as the No. 1 haunted house of the land went virtually unchallenged. Tenants came and went, but scarcely a year passed without some new and startling account of Borley's restless specters. Even the destruction of the old place by fire in 1939 failed to calm the ghosts who were seen by some disporting themselves in the flames. If there were any skeptics left, Price's own volumes, The Most Haunted House in England and The End of Borley Rectory, soon dispelled them. Even Sir Ernest Jelf, Senior Master...
...heralds over English titles, the society appointed three researchers to check Price's facts. Just published in England in a volume worthy to stand on any bookshelf alongside the best of Dorothy Sayers' adult mysteries, their findings seem destined to lay for all time the ghosts of Borley Rectory. At the least, say Researchers Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, Price was guilty of "overtelling" his tale...
...retracing Price's steps, Dingwall & Co. have found many explanations for the goings-on at Borley that require no ghosts to support them. An early rector, to whom some of the first visions appeared, was found to have been a chronic victim of a disease which caused him to sleep, perchance to dream, almost constantly. Price's own unpublished papers reveal that Mrs. Foyster, the young and restless wife of the aged and ineffective rector who followed the Smiths into Borley Rectory, showed a naughty tendency to fake ghostly manifestations. And Price, himself, it turned...